Correct and incorrect models

Today in class, somebody asked a question in my panel data econometrics class. The question concerned the assumption of strict exogeneity and whether it was violated in the example I gave before. I replied that yes, it could indeed be violated, but most of the time, in one way or another, a model will be mis-specified and assumptions will not hold in the strict sense. What I meant was that in some vague sense, the assumptions was a good enough approximation (without me going into the details of my example, think of the correlation between the error term and the regressor as being almost zero).

That made me think again of Milton Friedman, who argues in a famous essay that a model should be judged by its ability to predict counterfactual outcomes, or in his own words, “to make correct predictions about the consequences of any change in circumstances”. Sometimes, this is what we are after, and this is referred to as a positive approach (being able to make the right predictions)—as opposed to a normative one (where we can talk about welfare and how one can maximize it).

That sounds reasonable at first. But can we really make such a clear distinction? Can’t we simply see welfare as the outcome we would like to predict? Of course, we always need a model to make statements about welfare, but then it could also be that all models agree on the direction of the welfare effects of certain policy changes and only differ with respect to the exact magnitude. Therefore, I prefer to think of a model as a set of assumptions that are for sure wrong in the zero-one sense. But the question is how wrong, and that depends on the purpose the model is meant to serve. So, it’s a matter of degree. If the model allows me to make fairly accurate welfare statements (and I can be sure of that for whatever reasons—this is the red herring here), then I can apply Friedman’s argument that it’s good in his sense, but then I can even use if for welfare comparisons, so it serves a normative purpose. In a way, all this brings me back to an earlier post and in particular the part about Marshak.

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PS on September 19, 2014: There are two interesting related articles in the most recent issue of the Journal of Economic Literature, in discussions of the books by Chuck Manski and Kenneth Wolpin, respectively. In these discussions, John Geweke and John Rust touch upon the risk of making mistakes when formulating a theoretical model, and how we should think about that.

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About kleintob

Tobias Klein is an Associate Professor at Tilburg University. He is an economist by training and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Mannheim, Germany. Before that he visited the University of California at Berkeley Ph.D. program and the Ph.D. program at University College London, respectively for a year. He is passionate about economics, politics, food, and travelling. See http://www.tobiasklein.ws for his professional website.